Summary

The bear slows to a walk, with Sumner trailing behind. In Chapter 21, the surgeon finally draws closer and the bear pauses. Sumner reloads the rife, fires and kills the bear. Then he slices him open with a sharp blubber knife, thrusts his hands inside the bear's bloody carcass, and splashes the warm bear blood on himself. He tries to pray, but "instead of words what burbles from his brutalized mouth are inchoate grunts and gaspings of a savage" (203).

The Yaks discover Sumner, blood-spattered and half-dead, in the snow. They lift him into their sled and drag him back to their settlement where women give him water and heated seal blood to drink. In his delirious half-life, Sumner is aware that he has become a curiosity, or a possible omen, to the aboriginals who have saved him.

There is an English priest at the...